In Spirit We Travel and Diverge

In the beginning of Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Steinbeck asserts that “A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. . . . A journey is a person in itself: no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.  We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us” (3).  As we prepare to head out of West Point, toward our first stop, Niagara Falls, NY, we are excited and optimistic about the trip we have planned.  I find myself even more compelled by the character of the trip that lies beyond our plan.

Because of the constraints of time—we have three weeks to Steinbeck’s three months—we have lopped corners off our journey.  Because the United States Military Academy lies in the Hudson Valley, about an hour outside of New York City, we rationalized that our students had a better chance of visiting locations in New England and the Northeast generally than the Badlands or the Southwest.  We leave West Point in the spirit of Steinbeck.  And to those interested in the recent brouhaha that Steinbeck stayed in four-star hotels when he later wrote that he had been camping, I would remind our readers that his writing and ours falls under the generic heading of “creative nonfiction.”  I do not care where Steinbeck slept.  I do care that he brought an analytical lens to the America of 1960.  In that spirit we follow him.

If, however, Steinbeck’s definition of manhood kept him from admitting that, instead of the iconic, Western quest of the lone hero, he actually traveled with his wife Elaine as often as with his dog Charley, we are presented again with a false version of heroism that ignores the community and familial support on which human beings rely and through which great nations are made.  Steinbeck’s definition of manhood posits a brittle, inflexible, isolated figure who, having lived “violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much,” etc., stubbornly continues to equate masculine “fierceness” with self-destruction (17).  Maybe the first historical divergence we want to note on our anniversary tour is that powerful men and women in 2011—especially the ones I have met here at West Point—acknowledge the essential role of the community and family to the success of their lives.  We travel as a community, asking individually and collectively how our country has changed in these last fifty years, while actively inquiring how our country will be transformed in the next fifty. To be absolutely clear: we do not travel alone. 

~ Margaret Downs-Gamble